When Genres Collide

<p><b>Winner of the IASPM Canada Book Prize 2019</b><br><b><br>Honorable Mention for PROSE Award for Excellence in Music and the Performing Arts 2018</b><br><i><br>When Genres Collide</i> is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: <i>Down Beat</i> and <i>Rolling Stone</i>. Writing in 1955 Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll is the most raucous form of jazz beyond a doubt. So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? <p/>The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected overlapped or collided it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow. <p/>Recipient of and Honorable Mention in the PROSE Award Music & the Performing Arts 2018.</p>